


The Makepeace Amendment

by OrchardsinSnow



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Character Death Fix, Dragons, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, Grief/Mourning, He was never actually dead, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Minor Quentin Coldwater/Alice Quinn, Minor mending, Paperwork, Pining, Post-Canon, Underworld
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-03-08 05:44:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18888352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrchardsinSnow/pseuds/OrchardsinSnow
Summary: Dean Fogg continued. “When that spell went haywire in the mirror realm, it wasn’t just any spell. It was a mending spell.”“He fixed a couple of little cracks,” Alice said, trembling. “Just some minor mending.”“Minormending,” Dean Fogg said. He shook his head irritably. “Mayakovsky started calling it that decades ago—as a joke, because he was a bitter jackass, and because he was afraid of it. While a mending spell is active, nothing can be destroyed. Nothing. No one.”Eliot felt the hairs on his arms stand up.Poppy arrives with some news. Eliot acts without thinking. A juvenile dragon stirs up trouble. Alice appeals a decision. Magic has a strange exuberance. Fogg shares a theory. Meanwhile, there’s a certain name no one can say, or even think, no matter how hard they try.My vision of a Season 5 in which our surviving beloveds grieve, make discoveries, plot, and—yes—fix.Now complete.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The action picks up after the Season 4 finale. Thanks for reading!

**_Chapter 1_ **

It was a day like any other day for Eliot, Alice, Julia, Margo, Penny, and Kady—any other day of this brave new era, anyhow: endless emergency calls all over Manhattan from dawn until midnight, the six of them trying to contain the misfires of amateurs using erratically powerful magic. A day of trying to distract themselves from the thing that couldn’t be mentioned or thought of or dwelled on. The thing, the thing, the thing. The thing was. He was gone.

Lately, the six of them orbited one another like planets. They hadn’t explicitly made an agreement to travel as a pack, and it wasn’t a practice they obeyed religiously. It just sort of felt right—to each of them for different reasons, maybe. It felt right to be together, and it felt less right to be apart. On the rare occasions when one of them needed to be elsewhere, apart, they went. They returned. Alice to meetings with the Order, where she’d insisted on a long list of reforms before accepting the directorship. Penny back and forth to Brakebills, getting news and updates. There would be longer separations, eventually; whole lives were waiting in Fillory, for example. Fen. Josh. But for now they were, and felt like, a six-person unit: Eliot, Alice, Julia, Margo, Penny, and Kady.

Alice keyed them into the apartment at the end of this not-nearly-exhausting-enough day—and stopped in her tracks. “Poppy. Hi. How did you—what are you doing here?”

Eliot’s senses were on high alert. He put a hand on Alice’s shoulder and moved her behind him. Poppy, who no one had seen in months, was standing on the far side of the sofa, between the sofa and the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the wall. Her red hair was almost matted, piled into a messy bun, and there were dark circles under her eyes. Eliot didn’t think Poppy was dangerous, exactly, but she’d shown poor judgment in the past. And there was something else. He couldn’t place it. A weird energy in the room. A not-bad weird energy, possibly.

Poppy spread her arms wide and spoke in a stage whisper, a catch in her breath that was oddly emotional, knowing Poppy. “I thought it was important to find all of you and tell you that . . . I’ll just come right out with it. Well. The last time I saw—um— _him_. He asked me a question, and I gave him an answer I thought he wanted to hear. And. So. I . . . think I made a mistake.” Her eyes darted to a spot on the sofa. The middle section, where a certain fluffy throw pillow usually got tossed.

Eliot took three steps forward into the room, dragging legs that felt like heavy timber, anticipating—he didn’t know what. He stopped and froze, peering over the back of the sofa.

From the doorway, Alice, Julia, Margo, Penny, and Kady saw Eliot’s shoulders crumple. And they saw Poppy’s eyebrows furrow an increment further.

For her part, Poppy only saw Eliot’s face. Fat tears spilled out of his blinking eyes and rolled down his slack cheeks.

“Oh, Poppy,” he said, his own voice low and crackling with emotion. “You did make a mistake, didn’t you. You made a very, very bad mistake.” He folded at the waist and when he straightened up again, standing tall for the first time in months, Alice, Julia, Margo, Penny, and Kady could see that he was cradling to his chest a sleeping, breath-fluttering, entirely contented and eerily familiar-looking infant.

#

The six of them wouldn’t sleep that night.

Margo studied Eliot, who hadn’t spoken another word since lifting the child into his arms. He hadn’t been much for speaking at all, these recent weeks.

While Margo watched, Eliot had, however, 1) taken one of her desert-mauve scarves and wound it into a wearable sling with one deft hand motion, 2) swung it around his chest where the baby was nestled, 3) rummaged in Poppy’s bag for a bottle of her breast milk, 4) heated the bottle in a water bath on the stove, 5) washed his hands in the sink, 6) appeased the baby with his pinky finger when it began to fuss, 7) tested the temperature of the liquid against his wrist, and finally 8) tipped the bottle into the baby’s eager mouth.

Every so often, round crocodile tears spilled from his eyes. Not tears of happiness or of grief, but something else. They made Margo think of nothing so much as _overabundance_. He was leaking tears the ways the mirrors had leaked magic, that day.

Eliot hardly seemed aware. He only blinked his soaked lashes. He hardly seemed aware of anything but the baby. The baby and its needs. Needs he was apparently perfectly equipped to meet.

#

Poppy, seeing the immediate situation was in hand, sat slumped on the sofa with her head in her hands. “I don’t know what I was thinking. On top of normal pregnancy hormones, I was all messed up on dragon-egg vibes. We all were. Everyone but Julia, who was immune.”

Penny nodded his head. “We weren’t ever going to talk about it again, but since you brought it up, that was some strong shit.” Just thinking about it made him want to run out to the 24-hour bodega for a dozen cool, parchment-smooth eggs.

“I—I was going to tell him. Just not that day, because any reaction he might have had, good or bad, would have been dictated by those fucking egg pheromones,” Poppy said. “I figured I could revisit the topic once he . . . you know. Had a clear head. He had a lot going on.”

Eliot, still in the kitchen. Shook his head. _You can plan all you want to revisit a topic,_ he thought, _as long as the other person stays alive._

Julia was gazing out the windows toward the East River, brow furrowed in concentration.

Alice leaned toward Kady. “So Poppy and—“

Kady said “Apparently.”

“And he knew she was—”

“Yep.”

“But he didn’t know it was—”

“Nope.”

“She told him explicitly it wasn’t—”

“Yep.”

Penny broke in. “She’s genuinely sorry. For what it’s worth. I’m trying pretty hard not to see inside her particular mind right now, honestly. It’s not a fun place.”

Alice rose up off the couch, the tendons in her neck standing out, her hands in fists. “He would have never—I would have never let him—the mirror realm. He didn’t even have to. Anyone could have.” Julia pulled her back down onto the couch and patted her knee.

No one had to say it out loud. Maybe he’d have chosen differently. Maybe if he’d had this one extra very-not-insignificant reason to stay anchored to this life. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Hindsight, et cetera.

#

Kady flexed her fingers back and forth. She felt differently from Alice about what had happened in the mirror realm. She hated Everett, and she hated the mad lust for power that seemed to be a by-product of involvement with the Library, but she couldn’t bring herself to hate that her friend had made the sacrifice he had. Faced with an impossible choice, he had made an impossible choice. And because of him, an unthinkable evil—one he knew all too intimately—was gone from the world forever.

Maybe it all would have played out differently if it had been someone else in his place. If Alice had been trusted to go with Penny alone. If Margo could have been persuaded to leave Eliot’s side. She herself could have gone, if she’d just left Pete in charge of the Hedges. Maybe someone else would have been able to stop Everett. But those things didn’t happen. _This_ thing did.

#

The thing. One other thing. One other thing was that, ever since the memorial bonfire, no one had been able to say his name. Not the six of them. Not anyone. They couldn’t even think it. Not even the first letter of his name. The moment any of them tried to, instead of a word or letters forming in their minds, it was an image of him. A new one every time. The side of his face, hair dangling down. Just his fingers, lean and tan, wrapped around a book. A laugh, easy and open. For some of them, more intimate glimpses. Things they’d each privately prayed to always retain. _Please, let me never forget the sweaty nape of his neck. The slide of bone and tendon under the skin of his knee. Let me never forget his intake of breath, the way his voice would break. Let me. Let me. Please._

For Eliot, it was strangely comforting that the name was out of reach. He wanted to feel the ache of reaching for that name and failing, like a crow trying to pull a plum through the neck of a glass bottle with its beak. Like a crow trying to pull the whole world.

It was like the universe was saying _Keep his name out of your filthy mouth. Even you. Especially you._ Eliot liked that. He wanted to feel the rebuke.

And it wasn’t an erasure. Losing the name might have felt like a cruel deletion, like a race toward forgetting. Instead, it only amplified the size and shape of his absence, made it vibrate. In place of his name was a three-dimensional infinite hollowness, a super-dense black hole, a stuttering gasp of fresh remembering. How can _that_ person be missing from this world? Not his name but _him_ , his essence, was present in the mind of everyone who thought to speak of him, and that was many, many people.

#

“Want me to take him for a minute?” Margo said. Eliot shook his head vaguely, his long forearm bracing the infant against his chest as he rocked gently side to side. Margo turned her head to Poppy. “Him? Her? Is this baby presenting as male or female, as far as we know?”

“Her. She,” Poppy said. “I named her . . . Peace.”

Only Margo was near enough to hear Eliot sigh.

Margo rubbed Eliot’s back, since it seemed to be so soothing to the infant. “That outrageous middle name we all tortured him over.” _Makepeace._ This middle name, at least, she had access to.

But Eliot didn’t seem to need soothing. He seemed calm.

“What’s going on with you, though?” she asked. “This feels like a new leaf for you. Or a whole new tree, if I’m honest. Even with Fray, it took you a while to warm up.”

“I can do this, Bambi,” he said. “All I know is this is something I can do. Finally. I don’t even need to think about it. I just do it.”

He lifted his gaze and met her eye. “A baby just accepts love, doesn’t it? It doesn’t run away. Babies know so much.”

Margo summoned up one of her please-forgive-yourself speeches and opened her mouth to launch into it, but Eliot had more to say.

“I think I’ve done this before, somehow. We had a son, you know. I only got flashes, but that one was crystal clear. The three of us . . . three parents were better than two. We three, at any rate. And when there were just two of us, two was better than one would have been. No brainer.”

Alice had ventured closer, as she always did when mention was made of the 50-year mosaic quest. She had a ghoulish curiosity about it. It was like pushing on a bruise. He had lived at least one good, long, happy life. Without her, but he’d lived it. That meant something.

Margo raised her eyebrows at Eliot. “Don’t overcommit because you’re swept up in the moment. Start using a word like ‘parent’ and you can’t exactly back out later.”

“I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But moments are all that exist,” Eliot said. “Wouldn’t you agree, Alice?”

Alice felt herself flush. She knew Eliot still hadn’t sorted out his feelings about her sabotage at Blackspire, let alone the way the others—one specific other, really—had accepted her back into the fold while Eliot had been tucked away incommunicado.

But Eliot hadn’t said this to be cruel. He wasn’t mustering the energy for biting wit these days. He’d meant it earnestly, and he was right. She nodded.

She was grateful for this strange intimacy with Eliot. They’d both learned from the same person that the moments that would matter rarely presented themselves fully formed, and that these moments couldn’t be forced, not with any amount of scheming and maneuvers to secure control. These moments needed to be knitted together, frayed though the edges might be. The trick was to know your own heart when the time came, and to have the courage to reveal it. She’d managed, somehow. Eliot hadn’t. It was pure chance that it worked out that way, because it was the hardest trick in the world to pull off. The hardest trick in the multiverse.

Alice turned her attention to the dishes in the sink. She didn’t feel the way Eliot did about this fatherless baby with a too-familiar face. Not so immediately, anyhow. Not so completely. She wondered if she had known her own heart after all.

#

Eliot swayed from side to side and patted Peace gently on the back. She strained to lift her head from where it rested on his shoulder, tickled by a terry cloth towel he had draped there.

“El,” Margo said, “Don’t you think your shirt would be softer for her than that dish towel?”

The baby let loose a croaking burp, spitting up a glob of half-digested milk in the process.

“Yes,” Eliot said. “But a dish towel doesn’t need to be dry-cleaned.”

He folded the towel into a neat roll and dabbed the baby’s mouth with it before tossing it into the hamper. There were probably spells that would make short work of mundane chores like laundry, but it came more naturally to him to just do things the old-fashioned way. He made a mental note to buy some proper soft burp cloths.

#

While Poppy snored, deep asleep on the sofa, Eliot sat with Peace laid out on his lap, the baby’s head resting on his knees. Peace was awake, blinking and yawning, gripping Eliot’s finger in her small fist. He said out loud, to no one in particular, “I can’t believe I’m looking at his face. In miniature. And—our son’s face, in a way. We called him Teddy,” he said, as if remembering fully for the first time. “Or Rupert? Teddy. Definitely. He’d named him after his own dad.”

Kady smiled, caught Margo’s eye. It felt good to hear Eliot talking again.

“He used to love to sweep the floor,” Eliot went on. His face had a dreamy look, like he was seeing a filmstrip in his mind. “In the years before Teddy. Every morning, in that thatch-roof cottage of ours. I teased him about it, because it would just need to be done again at night, and the next day. He said that was what he liked about it. He could complete it, see his progress, and still know it would be waiting for him hours later. He was never at loose ends. After Teddy, the fastidious sweeping went by the wayside, but he had a new mission to anchor him then, didn’t he?”

The baby’s little bare foot kicked Eliot gently in his abdomen, where the scar from Margo’s axe was. The wound was fully healed now, thanks to magic, but he never stopped feeling it. _Imagine spending months of your life essentially handcuffed to an amoral monster,_ Eliot thought to himself, _an all-powerful amoral monster who was wearing your much-loved friend like a skin suit. Imagine working day and night to engineer a clean separation._ That months-long quest had ended, finally, with the blow from Margo’s axe. After that, the rest was housekeeping. Taking out the trash. Mending. _He felt adrift_ , Eliot thought. _If only he’d known._ If only he’d known that this new creature was waiting for him, full of need but also capable of growing and learning. Fatherhood. A quest that would last a lifetime.

Eliot tipped his head back on the sofa and let the tears flow. This time, they were tears of grief.

#

Alice flew off the sofa again, launched herself at the bookshelf. “This is bullshit. He should have known. It’s just—so unfair.” She started pulling volumes off the shelves and grabbing folders stuffed with handwritten notes.

“Alice,” Penny said. “Dial it down a little? We’ve been through this.”

Alice spun around, stack of books clutched to her chest. “I know. But . . . I just need to check something. I’ll be back.” She stepped into the coat closet. Her portal to the Neitherlands library branch.

#

Julia, who had been in a state of half-reverie since moments after they entered the apartment, stopped staring out the windows toward the East River. She leaned forward and shook Poppy awake.

“Hey,” she said. “We’ve been dealing with a juvenile dragon in the East River these past few weeks. Dive-bombing Park Slope nannies and au pairs, stealing tricycles. We have to glamour every civilian who sees a thing.”

Penny rolled his eyes and grunted in agreement. “It’s getting a little old.”

Poppy nodded. “That’s Falcor. That’s what I call her, anyhow. I can’t pronounce her real name. I haven’t been to see her yet, but I hear she’s a bit colicky.”

Julia furrowed her brow. “I think that dragon is looking for its sister.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alice explains she may have found a loophole. Eliot takes a nap and a shower. Margo debates negotiating with dragons. Dean Fogg delivers a message to the Underworld, and comes back with some surprising information.

**Chapter 2**

Kady looked up from her pad where she’d been scrawling notes. Morning light had begun to wash over the fixtures and surfaces of the apartment, softening them. “So the going theory is that Poppy spent so much time with the dragon egg while pregnant that the dragon bonded with this little one? And now it’s going to terrorize every after-school enrichment program in town until they’re reunited?”

Julia glanced over Kady’s notes and filled in some additional detail from the sightings she’d personally witnessed. “The dragon hasn’t actually harmed anyone—not so far. There’ve been a lot of spilled skinny lattes and car alarms activated.”

Eliot glanced to the wide sofa cushion where Peace was once again fast asleep. On her back, natch, with no blankets or pillows nearby as advised by the most trusted pediatric journals. Surrounded by at least six alert magicians, which would not have been realistic for pediatricians to advise but which would certainly have been met with approval.

“I’m not proposing any specific course of action,” Eliot said, “Other than keeping this one well hidden until we get our arms around the situation. But I will say that when supernatural creatures are separated from their siblings they tend to get a little extreme. Avoidance is not going to be a viable strategy.”

Margo, resting by his side, nestled into his chest and circled her arms around him. He didn’t bristle at the touch this time. She could hear his heart fluttering ever so slightly, the way it still did any time the monsters came up.

Poppy seemed more lucid after her nap. She checked her watch. “I’ve got to take her for a well-baby check-up soon. But later, if you won’t regard me as derelict for leaving her with you for an hour or six, I can go down to the dock and see what I can find out. I’m back on Garbage Dragon’s good side ever since I convinced the Port Authority to start dumping confiscated counterfeit goods into the river.”

Margo frowned.

Poppy shrugged. “She has a contact in the Underworld with tacky taste.”

Eliot blinked. “Penny and Julia, can you tag along on this doctor visit, in case Poppy and Peace need a quick exit strategy or any other manner of bodyguard services? Uncle Eliot and Aunt Margo will nap while you’re out at the doctor’s, Poppy, and then you can leave her with us while you go parlay with East River Garbage.”

Margo, who now had a hand coiled around Eliot’s upper arm, tightened her grip. “Tell Garbage we’ll kill that baby dragon if it so much as thinks of breathing on our niece.”

“Ow, Bambi,” Eliot said. “Fingernails. But yes. What she said.” It felt good to have an opinion about something again. Faintly, steadily, he could feel his own heart beating in his chest—and not because of fear, for once.

**#**

There was some new charge of electricity between Penny and Julia lately. His fingers grazed her back when they stood to leave. Eliot noticed it. He noticed Kady noticing it. He felt a tender sort of gladness for them, and just plain tender for Kady. He wondered, too, how he’d feel if an alternate-timeline doppelgänger for the person he loved—the person he still loved, yes—showed up one day, hauling with him an entirely different set of memories.

In a way, something like that _had_ happened. Eliot recalled coming to in the Brakebills infirmary, his addled mind unable to grasp anything but the surface-level truths, at first. _Alice_ is back? He’s _with_ Alice? He _was_ with Alice? He was. He _was._ He wasn’t anything, now. Isn’t anything now. Is gone.

Later, too soon maybe, he’d held Margo’s tear-stained sleeve and demanded more. _Did I hurt him, when I wasn’t myself?_ _Did this body hurt him, even once?_ And to himself: Did he forgive me for being so stupid, that day in the throne room? Did he even know I’d been stupid, or did he only know I’d been cold?

**#**

Eliot turned his face to his pillow, exhaustion breaking down the last of his defenses, and allowed himself to reach for the name. This time, when the images came, they weren’t tranquil domestic scenes but lurid flashes of blushing skin, a tongue curling up below the stubble of an upper lip, calloused fingertips grazing his rib cage, brown eyes burning and rapt, unflinching. He moaned and pressed himself into the mattress, aching, snaking a hand down, reaching, reaching, reaching.

**#**

It was almost noon when he rejoined Margo in the living room, feeling moderately rested, his hair damp from the shower.  

“I have to bring this up before Poppy is back, so you can prepare yourself, and have a clear head about it,” Margo said. “One, you know that dragons are extremely powerful. Even a juvenile dragon can accomplish a miraculous task with one swat of its tail.”

“And?”

“Two, a dragon has access to portals that should not even exist. To the Underworld and beyond.” Margo was using her no-nonsense high king voice, and it almost masked an underlying ribbon of sheer dread. Almost. “And three, even mature dragons are not known for their ethics. It’s possible Falcor will have some sort of _offer_ in mind.”

Eliot clenched his jaw. “You are not asking me if I think we should consider . . . trading. His daughter. To a dragon. To bring him back,” Eliot spat out. He pressed his two closed fists into his eyes. He had thought his fury with the universe was spent, these past few months. He was trembling with it once again. “You are not asking me that.”

Margo tugged on his forearms and wrapped her hands around his wrists. She bent until he couldn’t help but meet her eye. “I’m not! I’m only pre-raising it as a possible worst-case option that might be put on the table. This way, if it does come, it doesn’t come as a surprise. Believe me, I learned my lesson about bargaining away other people’s babies.”

“No more bargains. No more deals.” Eliot said, blinking slowly. “Absolutely not.”

Margo sat back, satisfied. “What way forward, then? You said it yourself, it’s not extremely plausible to keep a supernatural being apart from what it thinks is a sibling.”

Eliot said, “It’s up to Poppy, really. But what ever happened to an old-fashioned supervised play date?”

#

Alice reappeared in the afternoon, in the middle of Peace’s tummy time. Eliot had made a doll out of a tennis ball and a knee sock, and he wiggled it in front of Peace’s face to get her to lift her head and use her back muscles. Poppy had handed over a detailed schedule when she’d left to get information from the East River Garbage Dragon.

Penny, Julia, and Kady walked out from the kitchen carrying multiple steaming bowls of soup. They’d been eating a lot of rosemary-potato-leek soup lately. Kady dashed off a cooling spell and drank hers down in a series of gulps before heading out the door. Some weird sonic waves were coming from the Upper East Side, and she’d volunteered to go sort out whatever this latest magical mishap was.

“Eliot,” Alice said, tucking her pile of file folders under one arm and accepting a bowl of soup from Julia. “Can I talk with you in private?”

Eliot lifted his head, raised his eyebrows, and looked at Julia, who took his place lying prone on the living room area rug next to Peace.

Alice sat down across from Eliot at the kitchen counter and flattened her palms atop a pile of paperwork. “Listen,” she said. “I was going to take this up the chain even before Poppy showed up, but this new revelation just made me 150 percent sure I have a rock solid case. I’m going to do it.”

“Do what, Alice?”

“You remember how our Penny told us what happened when— _he_ —came through the Underworld?”

“Secrets Taken to the Grave. Not the secrets themselves, obviously, since Penny can’t disclose those, but the procedure. Yeah.” It made Eliot’s heart ache to envision what Penny 40 had described, limited as Penny was in what he could share. If Eliot had even imagined he could be seen during the memorial bonfire, he would have shouted his apologies at the top of his lungs, would made shreds of his own dignity, whispered his confessions, begged forgiveness. The unbitten peach he’d rolled into the fire was all of those things, he knew in his heart. He just didn’t always know how to take the things that were inside his heart and put them outside his heart, to make them visible and lay them bare.

“Well,” Alice said, “That program began as an experimental pilot project, in agreement with the Library. Secrets Taken to the Grave, I mean. There were terms agreed to, and protocols in place. I think I can make the case that the protocol is flawed. It’s fine to invite a soul to reveal secrets to itself, but—that’s not enough. If we can also invite it to learn of declarations that were undelivered because of an accident of timing, shouldn’t we do that, ethically? And truths that were mistakenly withheld. Because, you know, it just isn’t fair. It isn’t fair if someone . . . _dies_ without even _knowing_. Without every chance to be at peace.”

Eliot let this suggestion sink in. “Alice . . . you really think it would have brought him peace to know my heart? And you would have wanted him to know?”

“Of course, Eliot.” She nodded in that emphatic way she had. “I had my chance. I was so lucky. I think of it every day, how lucky I was. I didn’t deserve to be that lucky, just like you didn’t deserve to be as unlucky as you were that day at Blackspire, getting possessed,” she said. She took a deep breath. “I was a stupid, short-sighted, scared girl that day. I thought the only way to gain control was to shut people out. I finally learned— _he_ taught me—that seizing control is what weak people do. Strong people open their hearts. Strong people trust other people and are honest about what they want, what they love, what they’re trying to build and create.”

 _Am I a strong person?_ Eliot wondered. _Can I be? Can I allow myself to learn that lesson, too?_

“I don’t know what will come of this,” Alice said. “I don’t even know what’s possible. Maybe it’s too late. But I have to try.”

“I called you a condescending twat once, for wanting to help people who were beyond the reach of help. I hope you know, that quality is one of the things I most love about you. And I know this isn’t about me, but thank you for not writing me off as beyond reach.” He stretched out an arm to cup Alice’s elbow, which was about as close to a hug as she generally allowed.

Her lips curled into a tiny smile, and she blinked away tears that welled in her eyes.

“Do you think the Library will support you?”

“I run the Library now, and I support me,” she said. “So, yes. But just for the sake of thoroughness, I researched five thousand years of Library-Underworld contract litigation and dispute resolution processes, and cited the precedents in this brief. Dean Fogg agreed to carry the petition for me. The Underworld is the sponsor for Secrets Taken to the Grave. Ultimately, it’s up to them to make it right. I plan to hold them to it.”

The lights flickered, went out, and came back on again. Outside the apartment windows, a torrent of rain fell in sheets—in just a meter-wide microburst, bordered on both sides by shafts of powerful afternoon sun. A swarm of cranes flew by, their massive wingspans shedding rainbows as they went.

**#**

When Poppy returned from her diplomatic rendezvous, she was her usual direct self. “Falcor hatched prematurely, so Garbage used a growth acceleration spell on her. She’s now more like a teenager than a juvenile. That’s good, because her self-control is coming along. She’ll be fully grown in about two more days. But she doesn’t seem to be growing out of the desire to see her sister.”

“Does she want to eat Peace, or just have a play date where they splash in puddles?” Margo asked.

“Well, she definitively does _not_ want to eat Peace, which is, really, really great news.” Poppy said. “She’s a vegetarian. Oh! And her mother, Amelie, was a detector dragon. So she’s genetically compelled to track down things that feel lost or missing. I think that’s what’s making her search. She has no further motive. I gotta be honest, I really want to see if they can be friends.”

Eliot practiced staying open to possibilities, and trusting what other people wanted to create. “Okay. Let’s talk logistics. How many of us should be present to supervise a play date between the two of them? Is seven master magicians enough?”

**#**

Three days later, in a grassy Brooklyn park, Dean Fogg met with Eliot, Alice, Julia, Margo, Penny, Kady, and Poppy—with Peace in a sling across Poppy’s chest, dozing away.

Fogg rested his folded hands on the picnic table in front of him. “Hades weighed your arguments, Alice. He gave your petition fair consideration, in my opinion. He wanted me to pass along a few things. First, he expressed his sincere gratitude to all of you for the roles you played in ridding the world of the monsters responsible for the death of Our Lady Underground, among so many others. OLU was a fond companion of his, many months of the year, and that particular loss struck him deeply.” Fogg paused here, the way people sometimes do when mentioning the death of a god.

“And, Alice, he agreed that your arguments about the insufficiencies of Secrets Taken to the Grave were well reasoned. The intention of any pilot program is to discover drawbacks and flaws that can be addressed, so modifications are to be expected. The Underworld will henceforth arrange for newcomers to undergo two new sessions before moving on. In addition to Secrets Taken to the Grave, these will be . . .” Dean Fogg checked his notes. “Facts Mistakenly Withheld—with the bonus option to immediately wipe anything unwanted, which I think is a nice improvement—and Undelivered Declarations of the Heart. For Declarations of the Heart, it’s possible to opt in or opt out, but no take-backsies. He proposed calling this set of reforms the Makepeace Amendment.”

Alice nodded, her eyebrows still clustered together. Eliot covered her clenched hand with his own and stroked her thumb with his.

Fogg cleared his throat and continued. “And Hades acknowledged a clause in the pilot program agreement governing Secrets Taken to the Grave, concerning the rights of pilot program participants and remedies for oversights. After consulting with Penny 40, Hades also understands that the participant you identified could have achieved more complete resolution before moving on. He conceded that the remedy you proposed, in this single case, is appropriate.”

Alice let out a gasp of surprised relief. Eliot’s hand, clammy and white-knuckled now, tightened around hers.

“So he approved the petition?” Alice said. “We can retrieve— _him_ —from whatever’s beyond the Underworld? Or someone can?”

Everyone leaned forward. Without meaning to, they had all grasped one another’s hands until they formed a linked chain around the table, séance style. Dean Fogg was the only one not to join in.

“This is where the difficulty comes in,” he said, carefully. “Hades has contacts everywhere, and plenty of favors he can call in. He should have no problem locating a specific soul, no matter where it ended up. The problem is . . . no one can find—the soul we are looking for.”

Eliot spoke with his eyes closed. He felt Margo embracing him from the side, bolstering him. “What. Do you mean. No one can.”

Dean Fogg tapped the table with his pointer finger. “I mean he was never even there in the first place. Not in the Underworld, even.”

Alice wrested her hand away from Eliot’s grasp and slapped her palm on the table. “Penny 40 took him through. I spoke with him, he—he told me everything he could. The Metro card—do they track those?”

Dean Fogg held his hands up. “Our working theory—now, this is only a theory—is that that was a complex illusion our boy set up at some point in advance of the mirror realm mission. My guess is he imagined something might go wrong in there. He was afraid his soul would never make it out, and that his friends would therefore never feel he was at rest. So he arranged for a realistic avatar to go through the motions on his behalf. It was very sophisticated magic, and very convincing.”

Margo huffed. “Yeah! We were convinced! Mission accomplished. Why would you tell us the truth about that and undo it all?”

“Because there’s more to it. I don’t think his soul is trapped in the mirror realm after all.”

Eliot seemed frozen in place, his posture stiff. Even now, when he spoke, his lips barely moved. “Say more.”

Dean Fogg continued. “When that spell went haywire in the mirror realm, it wasn’t just any spell. It was a mending spell.”

“He fixed a couple of little cracks,” Alice said, trembling. “Just some minor mending.”

“ _Minor_ mending,” Dean Fogg said. He shook his head irritably. “Mayakovsky started calling it that decades ago—as a joke, because he was a bitter jackass, and because he was afraid of it. While a mending spell is active, nothing can be destroyed. Nothing. No one.”

Eliot felt the hairs on his arms stand up.

“You all know that magic comes from pain. It’s important for pain to have a productive outlet, and it’s fairly natural to channel pain outwardly the way a magician needs to do. But mending magic is different. Mending magic doesn’t come from pain. Mending . . . comes from love.”

Dean Fogg looked each of them in the eye, one by one. “What you saw in that moment, Alice, was—forgive me, all, for calling up past traumas—not destruction, but pure magical intention bonding with every atom in his body. _Mending_ intention. And at the same time, a multiverse worth of magical energy was being released from Everett’s . . . husk.”

Kady flexed her fingers, remembering. “It leaked through all the mirrors. It spilled everywhere. We all felt it.”

“That magic— _this_ magic—is where he is,” Fogg stated, spreading his arms wide. “And he is very much alive.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not the end! One more chapter to come. Hope you are enjoying this . . . leave a comment if you feel inclined!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Eliot, it followed, would ride the dragon._

**Chapter 3**

Dean Fogg gave the seven magicians who surrounded him a moment to absorb what he had just said. _That magic—_ this _magic—is where he is. And he is very much alive._

“What do you mean he _is_ magic? Is he a Niffin?” Alice couldn’t contain her distress. It made her voice break like glass.

“I didn’t say he _is_ magic.” Dean Fogg shook his head. “I said he is _in_ magic. Think of it like the aftermath of Chernobyl or Fukushima. Radioactive molecules behave differently from normal molecules. Once released into the atmosphere, they penetrate and attach themselves to things in unexpected ways, invisibly.”

Eliot rubbed his temples. “Did you just compare our extremely beloved friend to deadly nuclear fallout?”

Fogg shrugged. “I’m an educator and a magician, not a wordsmith. Think of it like flavoring, then. Like a drink mix you stir into a pitcher of water.”

Eliot grimaced. His heart was pounding out of his chest, but still. Drink mixes were gauche.

Margo petted his hand. Margo always understood. “So he’s a packet of Emergen-C, let’s say, giving an extra fizz to all the magic there is,” Margo said. “How do we get him out? Is there a distillation spell? A filter?”

Penny held up his hand. He’d watched the scene go down in the mirror realm, and while he wanted to hold onto hope for what Fogg was describing, there hadn’t only been mending energy in that moment. There had also been a crazed, power-hungry librarian. “Wait—is Everett also ‘in’ magic? I saw what happened to him, and it didn’t look that different from what happened to—you know.”

“Everett was only about one tenth of one percent human by the time he appeared in the mirror realm,” Fogg said. “His humanity had been consumed by his manic greed. He was a mere husk. Our boy, on the other hand, was ninety seven percent healthy, viable human.”

“Only ninety seven?” Poppy asked.

“He had a wooden collarbone and shoulder. Centaur medicine. It was . . . a whole thing,” Eliot said. He breathed deeply. This might all add up. This could be—this could be reason to hope.

He made eye contact with Alice across the table. It was shining in her eyes. Hope. Gratitude swelled up in him. He did his best to bring all he had to the surface, to show her a glimmer in return.

Julia was staring at her hands, at a simple spark she made appear in her palms, enraptured.

Margo was doing her best to appear calm and collected, all the while holding on for dear life to Eliot’s thigh beneath the table, as if she was afraid one of the two of them might float up to the sky like a balloon.

Penny shook his head the way he did when other people’s thoughts were too overwhelming for him.

Kady was finger tutting. Whatever she was doing, she was gathering a lot of magic to do it. Eliot could feel it swirling overhead like a cloud. He felt it get denser, then he felt it spin like it was in a centrifuge. The trees that filled the park dimmed from bright green to a dull olive drab, then brightened again, as the vortex of magic was released and dispersed back into the atmosphere.

Kady bent her nose down close to the table. She pressed her finger to the surface, then lifted it up again. There, nestled in a whorl of her fingertip, was a single silky brown eyelash, not very long, delicately curved at one tapered end.

“Jesus,” Eliot said. He felt faint. Eyelashes weren’t exactly as distinct as snowflakes, yet hadn’t he brushed versions of this eyelash from a sleeping face countless times?

“Nobody get any sudden ideas about making a wish,” Margo said. She pulled a miniature Ziploc bag from the tiny pocket of her jeans (“What? I haven’t worn these jeans since Ibiza, second year”) and scooped the lash into it with surgical precision.

“So, we have to put all the magic in the world through a spin cycle?” Penny asked. “How would that even work?”

Fogg sighed. “We’ll assign a team of Brakebills faculty to propose some methods. I wish I could tell you this would be a quick process, but I’m afraid this may be a very arduous ordeal. That being said, trust me. Together, we will make him whole again.” He said this looking straight at Eliot.

Eliot nodded. Arduous was nothing. Eliot would stick it out, and he’d hold onto his sanity, too. He was determined.

Across the table, next to Alice, Poppy looked at her watch. “We’ve got another play date in a few, so we’d better run. But if it’s an efficient filter you need, well. I’ve told you guys before, right, that dragons don’t shit?”

The whole table went silent and stared at her. She looked utterly serious. “Don’t look at me like that. Dragons are the perfect filter. They fly through air, they swim through water. Whatever they ingest goes elsewhere—wherever they send it. They’re gatekeepers, you know? They don’t just make portals. They _are_ portals.”

#

Walking down toward the dock, Eliot, Alice, Julia, Margo, Penny, Kady, and Poppy were characteristically quiet, but for uncharacteristic reasons. The sparkling, gorgeous world around them demanded their attention. Wind rustled in the trees. The ground beneath their feet felt springy. The very air tasted fresh.

Eliot experimented with thinking of the name he still wanted so badly to be able to hear or to say. This time, in light of what he had just learned, he let himself simply enjoy the images and memories that came to him. He saw hands in movement this time—nimble, strong fingers making subtle shapes, coaxing magic into some intended purpose. Those beautiful hands. Every magician’s tuts had a signature “voice,” and Eliot now saw an element of pure, soft care where he had once seen timidity and shyness. Care and power. _Mending comes from love_. He vowed never to underestimate his friend again. Not any of his friends.

#

Falcor was waiting for them at the end of her favorite pier. Almost fully grown, she was about the size of a subway car, but pointier at both ends. She was mostly pearlescent white, her scales soft and beady, with a mane of gossamer turquoise and aquamarine hair that ran from between where her eyebrows might be to the middle of her back. Her wings she kept folded up behind her forelegs most of the time, but when she unfurled them, to performing a swoopy dance in the sky that would make Peace laugh, for example, they were translucent, lavender, and as wide as she was long. Her amethyst eyes were expressive and intelligent.

The East River Garbage Dragon lurked just off shore, using her mind to redirect civilians who observed the scene.

The first play date had been surprisingly delightful, despite the seven master magicians being on edge and constantly one tut away from releasing a magic missile. Peace had smacked her little hands wildly, drooled, and shrieked with excitement upon seeing Falcor, and Falcor had wiggled her dragon nose and waggled her dragon toes, all from a cautious distance. They’d all agreed to try it a second time, and if this second play date went well, they’d arrange a third.

The dragon couldn’t speak English yet, but she could understand it. She could also understand Peace’s grunts and babbles, judging by the long exchanges that seemed to pass between the two of them, unintelligible to anyone else. On essential items, the East River Garbage Dragon translated, but this proved necessary only rarely.

Today, Falcor showed off a new trick: she could make her scales ripple like a wave, washing the group in spots of reflected light like confetti. Peace cooed and giggled.

After an hour of this, Eliot fidgeted. He was gathering the nerve to make a proposal to Garbage and Falcor, to begin some sort of negotiation. Falcor looked at him with her reptilian amethyst eyes and blinked once.

“She wants to help you,” Garbage said.

Eliot, Alice, Julia, Margo, Penny, Kady, and Poppy all looked at each other.

“How does she even know?” Kady asked.

“She just knows. She can see you need it. And she knows you’ve been kind to her. You love her sister.” Garbage made a movement with her spike-crested head that could have been interpreted as a shrug.

“It might take a long time,” Alice said. “She’ll need to go all over the multiverse, and through the oceans, too.”

“She doesn’t care. Time doesn’t mean anything to a dragon.”

Poppy, who had had one hand on Peace this whole time, now wrapped her in both arms, slowly, firmly.

Garbage shook her head.

“She isn’t asking a price. And she doesn’t have any stipulations,” Garbage said. “But I do. One of you should go with her. Glamour any humans who happen to catch a glimpse and get funny ideas.”

#

After another thirty minutes of strategizing in a huddle, a basic plan was in place. Falcor would create a portal to the centaurs’ retreat in Fillory, where she’d send everything she collected. Margo would persuade the surgeons there to recreate the prosthetic shoulder and do any other reassembly work necessary. Kady would enlist Hedges around the world to detect unusual concentrations of magic and send up signals into the atmosphere. Alice, similarly, would monitor the knowledge base at the Library, looking for similar flare-ups in other worlds, and send along anything helpful. Julia and Penny would travel back and forth among worlds, troubleshooting and delivering messages. And Poppy would stay in Manhattan with Peace, who was developmentally ready to start socializing with other (human) babies.

Eliot, it followed, would ride the dragon.

He pulled Margo aside. “What if—shouldn’t I be there, though? At the centaurs’ retreat? I should be there to make sure it goes smoothly.”

Margo gave him her sharpest side eye. “Think again, dear heart. I can handle this. When he starts— _accumulating_ —it’s not gonna be like a dot matrix printer, all orderly rows of cells lining up one by one until he’s recognizable. My guess is it’s probably gonna be a smorgasbord of miscellaneous organs and body parts at first, and I don’t think you want that mental image seared into your brain.”

Eliot’s eyes fluttered closed and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “No. I do not. You’re right as always, Bambi.”

#

There were the logistics of the ride to consider. Eliot steeled himself and approached Falcor, who bent to let him feel her silky mane of hair and the smooth, pearly surface of her scales.

“Should we commission a custom saddle? That’s going to take a few days.”

Falcor gave him a withering look. She scrunched her eyes closed for a moment, and the flesh of her neck area shifted to form two cartilaginous handholds and two foot stirrups. She gestured to him to mount.

“Oh. Now?”

Now.

As the sun dipped low in the western sky behind the cage of Manhattan’s skyline, the dragon rose aloft with Eliot Waugh on her back, circled once above his waving cluster of friends, and flew off into the distance.

#

For four and a half months, Eliot rode the dragon.

They traveled together through the Saharan desert, up the mountains of Nepal, across the verdant forests of Brazil, finding concentrations of magic and passing it through the sieve of Falcor’s gills. They skimmed ice floes in Nordic straits, raced birds around the temples of Cambodia, skirted through the clustered high-rises of Singapore and Dubai. They dove in and out of Neitherlands fountains into countless worlds, chasing dollops of magic wherever Alice and the Hedges sent up beacons.

Eliot kept humans and other creatures at bay with distraction spells, or glamoured them when they stared in shock at the great flying lizard creature glinting in the sun. He slept inside a bubble of oxygen on Falcor’s back while the dragon Hoovered the ocean’s depths, night after night. The wind whipped Eliot’s face until it was numb and the sun bronzed his skin, despite the layers of enchantments he thought to give himself. His shoes fell away, his shirt loosened itself and flowed into the slipstream, his jeans were torn to strips. He ate anything Falcor scooped up for him from a market stall or a café table in passing, drank rainwater Falcor collected in special ducts beneath her wings. They never stopped flying. They never stopped gathering the molecules that Eliot hoped— _he hoped_ —contained the building blocks of a man he loved with all his heart.

Finally, one day in the middle of Earth’s January, a sunny day in Fillory, the beacons dwindled, and came to a final, decisive, serene stop.

#

“ _Quentin_ ,” Margo gasped, blinking awake, peeling her cheek from a puddle of drool on the centaurs’ operating table and feeling a warm, pulsing, very alive hand gripping hers.

“ _Quentin_ ,” Kady said, all the wind going out of her, hands trembling in the middle of a cooperative spell to replace the caps on fifty fire hydrants that had burst all across the city.

“ _Quentin_ ,” Alice said, her voice almost a hiccup, dropping to her knees in the Neitherlands Library branch and watching a book triple in size before her eyes, filling a gap on a shelf that she had never allowed to be closed.

“ _Quentin_ ,” Julia said, whispering, standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows in the apartment and watching a cloud take the shape of the ace of spades—and then reform itself into a heart-burstingly beautiful, utterly normal cloud shape.  

“ _Quentin_ ,” Poppy thought, seeing his crooked smile on her daughter’s face as she watched a gossamer dragonfly bouncing from flower to flower in a greenhouse.

“ _Quentin_ ,” Fogg said, watching his collection of globes begin to undulate smoothly with soft points of light for the first time in months.

“ _Quentin_ ,” Penny shouted, popping from thin air onto the back of the young dragon as it came in to land in a great field of golden grain somewhere in China, seizing Eliot by the arm as he was petting the dragon’s soft scales and saying _Good Falcor. Good girl_.

“ _Quentin_ ,” Eliot sighed, popping from thin air alongside Penny in the middle of the centaurs’ retreat, breathless and stumbling to avoid falling all over the warm, pulsing, very alive body of Quentin Makepeace Coldwater, managing somehow to catch himself gracelessly and to offer up a warm, pulsing, very alive hand of his own to cradle Quentin’s cheek. “ _Quentin_ ,” he said. The name poured out of him in desperate, joyful bursts. “ _Quentin, Quentin, Quentin_. Quentin.”

#

Quentin was lying still on the large, high comfortable platform the centaurs used for operating tables and recovery beds. His chest, rising and falling, was bare but for a crisp white sheet. He didn’t seem ready to move his head; his eyes, however, followed Eliot as he recovered his balance and stood tall again. Eliot tried to keep his knees from knocking. He looked around for Margo, and realized she had slipped out. He was still petting Quentin’s face.

_I should probably stop doing that_ , Eliot thought, _in a minute, I’ll stop_. Quentin grasped his free hand and squeezed it tightly. Eliot could feel him trembling.

“Sea legs?” Quentin said. His voice was raspy.

“Dragon legs.” Eliot reached for a glass of translucent greenish liquid on Quentin’s bedside table and used the straw as a dropper, feeding Quentin like he might feed a baby bird. “Can you sit up?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Welcome back.” Eliot said. “I can’t believe it’s you, and you’re . . . here.”

Quentin made a sound like a laugh, at a loss for words. “Took you long enough.”

“Hey! You might recall setting up a very convincing Underworld proxy illusion, you reckless dummy. If it hadn’t worked so well and thrown us off the scent, we might have gotten started sooner . . . ” Eliot said. He raked the hair back from Quentin’s face using his free hand. His other hand, twined with Quentin’s, was resting somewhere near Quentin’s breastbone. “But no, Falcor wasn’t even mature.”

“Falcor?”

“Dragons are filters. They don’t shit. It’s—we can talk about it later.”

“I shouldn’t joke,” Quentin said. “It took exactly as much time as it took. Thank you.”

Quentin pulled their intertwined hands up toward his face, using the back of Eliot’s hand to stroke the side of his own face. His other arm, the one with the wooden shoulder, was apparently not in commission yet.

“Will you kiss me?” Quentin said.  

If he was asking that . . . Eliot would have to fill the gaps in Quentin’s memory at some point. He would have to tell Quentin everything, the way he himself had been told—Everett, the faceoff, the leaking mirrors. Before that, the scroll and the god cake. Before that, Alice.

But not just yet.

He bent to bring his lips to Quentin’s, slowly, gently, using all his strength to restrain himself when a shock of desire and muscle memory coursed through him. He whimpered into Quentin’s mouth. _You reckless dummy,_ he thought. _I love you._

“You’re holding back,” Quentin said.

“And you’re very freshly human,” Eliot said. “Let’s take it one step at a time.”

Eliot hoisted himself up onto the wide bed and lay atop the sheet that was covering Quentin. It felt unbelievable to just let the whole length of body make contact with Quentin’s: shoulder, elbow, hip, calf. Toes. He badly needed a pedicure.

He turned onto his side so he could look at Quentin. Quentin entwined their fingers together again. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I was conscious, during all that time?” Quentin asked.

Eliot stroked Quentin’s fingers with his thumb. “Please say you weren’t in pain. Were you?”

“No,” Quentin sighed. “And I wasn’t exactly conscious . . . but there was something that happened. I could tell when people were thinking of me, somehow. I felt pulled to, I guess, be in _their_ consciousness. And while that was happening I was feeling what they were feeling when they thought of me. Um.” He frowned. “By the way— my daughter?”

Eliot beamed. “She’s amazing. As soon as it’s safe for you to travel, you’ll know it yourself.”

Quentin’s eyes went wide and he shook his head, dazed.

Eliot squeezed his hand. “We couldn’t say your name, you know. Couldn’t think it. We ended up just thinking of _you_.”

“That was it. You thought of me . . . a lot.”

“Not only me.”

“No, not only you,” Quentin said. “It felt wonderful, most of the time. I wish everyone could experience knowing how people feel about them. But, also . . . it’s because of what I came to understand when I was in the minds of other people, what _they_ came to understand, maybe, that I’m not asking why Alice isn’t here right now. Why I’m glad it’s you and not her.”

“Oh,” Eliot said. “You didn’t just forget.”

“I didn’t forget.”

“She does love you,” Eliot said. “She helped us find this route to you.”

“I know she loves me. She loves me just enough to lose me to you, and she knows it.”

Eliot felt a tear spill out of his eye and trail down his temple into the bedding under him.

Quentin twisted to face Eliot, holding his wooden shoulder gingerly. “Hey,” he said. And then he kissed Eliot as Eliot wanted to be kissed, without any lingering hindrances between them, with the fierce tenderness and raw hunger that only a newly reconstructed human body can muster.

#

Later, when Quentin had graduated to sitting upright, Eliot produced the tiny Ziploc bag containing the eyelash. He was sitting next to Quentin, shoulder to shoulder, both of them shirtless in the big bed under a canopy of stars.

“I think we might have used this to Frankenstein you from your DNA if this other thing hadn’t panned out,” Eliot said. He put the eyelash on his fingertip. When it came to wishes, there were a lot of options on the table. Quentin didn’t need any time at all. He puffed at it and it disappeared.

“Well?” Eliot asked.

“I wished for Alice to find happiness.”

“Huh,” Eliot said.

“You and I,” Quentin said, turning to him, entwining him, straddling him, “are going to spend all our lives making one another happy. And we don’t need an eyelash, or a wish, or even magic for that to happen.”

He crushed Eliot’s mouth with his, punctuating a vow. _Quentin_ , Eliot thought. _Quentin, Quentin, Quentin._

 

THE END.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Hope it was entertaining!


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